pedagogy

Generous funding from Northwestern University Libraries has guaranteed the expansion of “Renaissance Books, Midwestern Libraries,” an initiative I began in 2014 with a Mellon-based seed grant. This undergraduate-powered project aims to report Northwestern’s pre-1700 Special Collections holdings to the English Short Title Catalogue, the British Library’s foremost online catalog for early printed books printed in England or in English. When we began almost four years ago, Northwestern’s representation in the ESTC was a meager 188, but thanks to the diligent work of Weinberg College students Hannah Bredar, Erin Nelson, Nicole Sheriko, Katie Poland, and Jake Phillips, there are over 2,500 pre-1700 volumes at Northwestern Special Collections matched to the catalog, with shelfmarks and some copy-specific details. Updates on the first phase and second phase of this project, which included exhibits and symposia, can be found on this website.

In this third stage of this project, I have teamed up with my English Ph.D. colleague Anne Boemler to supervise the reporting of hundreds of pre-1700 books at smaller Northwestern-affiliated libraries. These libraries include: Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary’s Styberg Library, the Galter Health Sciences Library, and the Northwestern Law Library. We estimate there may be as many as 3,000 ESTC-eligible books printed before 1700 at these smaller libraries; matching them into the catalog would double the work we have done already, putting these items “on the map” for scholars/ESTC users who might be in town to conduct research nearby (say, at the Newberry Library). This portion of the work is also an opportunity to refine Northwestern’s ESTC presence more broadly — for instance, a library code still existed for Northwestern’s Dental Library, which was subsumed into the Galter Library when the Dental School closed decades ago.

In addition to reporting the pre-1700 books at these libraries, Phillips and Poland are also associating each of these volumes with an EEBO-TCP code. This will offer Martin Mueller a clearer idea of which poorly-imaged EEBO titles might be redigitized freshly for users requiring textual content (part of a move toward a “FrEEBO”).

This phase of the work is expected to continue through the end of the Spring term, concluding with an exhibit on theological books at the Styberg Library. If you are interested in knowing more about what old books can be found at Northwestern, feel free to email me; I can supply a mostly comprehensive list of pre-1700 holdings at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in Evanston. The list will continue to grow as this Spring’s collaboration goes forward.

This fall, I have been trying out a number of strategies to integrate writing exercises, literary readings, and Special Collections visits in my undergraduate pedagogy. These experiments – that’s the word I prefer to use – allow the classroom to become a kind of laboratory for humanistic inquiry and expression. In the course I’m currently teaching, an English composition seminar entitled “Forms of Belonging,” I use a variety of writing technologies and pedagogical media to help my students think carefully about the texts they read and the ideas they communicate verbally and in written forms. One assignment I’ve been using for this course is a seventeenth century-style “commonplace book.” Here, I’m adopting a pedagogical technique used already by many of my colleagues in early modern studies, including Colleen Kennedy, Adam G. Hooks, and many others; this account simply represents what has worked for me.

In this course, the commonplace book has encouraged my students to write regularly in an informal and process-oriented (rather than product-oriented) way. On the first day of class, I introduced my students to the idea of a commonplace book, spending about 5 to 10 minutes talking about what they were, who used them, and why. As a specialist in early modern literature, this was an opportunity to bring some field-specific knowledge into the composition classroom, but I kept it very light and brief so as to foreground the actual purpose of the exercise: regular writing practice. For commonplacers, I said, originality wasn’t a requirement – in fact, “gathering and framing” textual material from various sources (advertisements, texts we read in class we read, texts we don’t read in class, songs overheard on the radio, etc.) would be an ideal way to fulfill the assignment.

I then passed out cheap, plastic-covered, pocket-size notebooks I bought at a local drugstore earlier that week, urging students to write their names in them and to personalize them textually as the term proceeded. I’ve collected these books every two weeks, not to scrutinize their contents but to survey my students’ writerly practice in an impressionistic way. If the three essay assignments in this course offer chances for me to evaluate my students’ work formally, the commonplace book (which stands as a portion of the participation grade) provides a more experimental platform to try out writing and to do it regularly. In my students’ books, I’ve found poetry, journal entries, notes on literature and class discussion, math problems, diagrams, and a variety of other kinds of scribbles and doodles. (For the sake of my students’ privacy, I will not show any examples, but leave you to imagine the range of creative and critical expression here.)

If this pedagogical strategy integrates the regular and experimental physical activity of writing with the readings in the course (and beyond), it also connects with the Special Collections units I’ve organized. For the first of these, which provided a material-textual dimension to our class discussions of Isabella Whitney’s “The Manner of Her Will” and Michel de Montaigne’s “On the Cannibals,” my students got a chance to see a real early modern commonplace book up close. On the first inscribed page, they observed how this book’s compiler was doing something similar to what they were in their blank books:

This book, Northwestern MS 67, has handwriting in both italic and secretary scripts; arranged alphabetically, it includes passages from authors including Lucretius, Shakespeare, and Sidney. My students were particularly struck by the unfinished quality of this vellum-bound volume — over half its leaves are completely blank, really exposing this kind of text as a work-in-progress. Altogether, looking at this book enabled my students to think across time and across textual media, linking their own commonplacing experiments and composition exercises to the material text in front of them. It made for one of the best class meetings we had. Not all colleges or universities have commonplace books like MS 67, but digital resources can acquaint students with English miscellanies such as Folger E.a.1. This is certainly an exercise I’ll want to continue for a variety of courses, and I’ll be eager to learn new ideas about recruiting the commonplace book for teaching purposes (including from you, dear reader).

VADE MECUM

A book or manual suitable for carrying about with one for ready reference; a handbook or guidebook. (Sometimes used as the title of such a work.) (OED)